You Are Here: the new David Nicholls 'past-their-prime' romance

David Nicholls is a "literary paradox". The "One Day" author has "never won a major book prize, yet retains a virtually critic-proof common touch".

He's popular with readers "because he mines with exquisite intimacy the humdrum aspects of daily life", said The Telegraph, carving out a niche as "a poet of the mundane, like Larkin without the misanthropy". 

And "these qualities feel embedded in the DNA" of his sixth novel, "You Are Here".

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Two "middle-aged and isolated" would-be lovers meet on a walking weekend in the Lake District, both burdened with the baggage of failed marriages, as well as "massive, unwieldy rucksacks", said The Times.

Marnie and Michael are the only walkers in their group "willing to persevere" with a coast-to-coast walk across northern England following a "series of cancellations, drop-outs and hissy fits about the low-grade towels in provincial hotels".

"You Are Here" shares "many of the winning ingredients" from his other bestsellers: "turbulent holidays, marital troubles, witty conversation, a friendship that might become love, plus fear of the wasted life". 

Told in chapters alternating between the protagonists' perspectives, Nicholls "takes equal care with both characters", said the i news site. Most of the "gentle comedy" comes from Marnie, "particularly when she's in the latest B&B on her laptop editing a manuscript for an amusingly erotic thriller ('she looked up a synonym for "girth", sighed and closed the lid')". 

Meanwhile, as "a shrewd observer of modern life and love", Nicholls has Michael worrying about how his "main source of communication with his ex is 'through the streaming accounts they still shared, a strangely intimate diary… written in code. Should he worry about the serial killer documentaries?'"

It's the interplay between Marnie and Michael – "the performative banter, the tentative revelations" – that make the book such good company, said The Times. And its protagonists may "start with midlife disenchantment" but along the way they "rediscover romantic feelings they thought they had lost". 

However, things generally "move along with an air of inevitability", said The Telegraph, which means that "there's barely any dramatic predicament in which to invest" and so "it all becomes dull". While his characters are "often out of their comfort zone", here Nicholls is "much too firmly in his".

Published on 23 April, Sceptre 320pp £20